Sunday, February 10, 2013

Ian Rickson's new production of Harold Pinter's Old Times is currently wowing the critics in London and beyond. Late last year I was invited to visit rehearsals and talk to the cast about the workings of autobiographical memory, which plays such an important role in the piece. Those conversations led to me being invited to write an essay for the programme, which I have reproduced below.

I got to see the production a couple of weeks ago, with Lia Williams in the part of Anna and Kristin Scott Thomas playing Kate (one interesting thing about the production is that the female actors swap roles every few days). Many of the reviews have pointed out how different the two casting configurations are, and I'm hoping to see it again with the female roles reversed. Williams was a revelation as Anna, fanatically pulling on threads to the past and managing to convince the others of memories they hadn't known were there. Scott Thomas was devastatingly restrained and then brutal in the play's climax, as the three characters fought over the details of their past lives together. Rufus Sewell was funny, violent, simmering and obsessive as Deeley, the man whose memories of the play's two key events appear to be shaped by his feelings about the two women involved.

Whichever way you get to see Old Times, it runs until 6 April. I couldn't recommend it more highly.

From the Old Times programme:

Creative Memories

Forty years after its first performance, Old Times shows a prescient sensitivity to the quirks of autobiographical memory. The efforts of Anna, Kate and Deeley to reconstruct the past—and to some extent themselves—mirror many of the themes that have preoccupied cognitive scientists in the decades since Pinter wrote his play.

The psychologist and memory expert Martin Conway has proposed that two forces go head-to-head in memory. The force of correspondence acts to make our memories true to the way things were, while the force of coherence acts to tell a story that suits the self. We know that autobiographical memory is a reconstructive process, drawing together different sources of information and putting them together in ways that can differ subtly from telling to telling. These dynamic reshapings often serve to make memories as true to how we want the past to be as to how it actually was.

Deeley’s memory is slave to the force of coherence. He wants things to be a particular way, so he makes them so. The two key events of the play—the cinema showing and the party—are recalled in ways that selectively construct and filter the key details, even to the extent of screening out people who might actually have been there. In Deeley’s mind, only Kate was present at the showing of the movie Odd Man Out; only Anna was there at that fateful Westbourne Grove party. We don’t know the actual facts of the matter, because the two women’s memories can be as unreliable as Deeley’s, but we get the strong impression that he has reshaped these events to suit himself.

It is Anna, of course, who actually gives voice to this idea: ‘There are some things one remembers even though they may never have happened. There are things I remember which may never have happened but as I recall them so they take place.’ The reconstructive nature of memory guarantees it this creative power, and furnishes it with properties that make it something akin to imagination. In fact, neuroscientists now think that imagination and memory draw on common neural resources, in the hippocampus and medial temporal lobes of the brain.

It’s perhaps no surprise, then, that imagination can feed into memory, and that things imagined can become things remembered. Psychological studies support the idea that simply imagining that something happened can in some cases lead us to ‘remember’ it. Kate, the dreamer, imagines seeing Anna dead (it’s not hard to see why she might feel this way about her old friend). But in the laboratory of her scenario-juggling mind, that imagining turns into a memory. ‘I remember you. I remember you dead.’ As she imagines it, so it takes place.

Of course, Old Times resists any such simple explanation, and the complexities of the play run far deeper than this. Like all of us, Kate edits her memories, updating them as new information comes to light. She knows that Anna didn’t really die—she is standing there before her, fully alive—but she still experiences it as a memory. This is not a hallucination or a sign of mental disorder. Psychologists have reported that large numbers of us have what are termed nonbelieved memories: memories for events that we no longer believe actually happened. That would appear to be the fate of some imaginings that are converted into memories and which we later realise could not literally be true. Some people ‘recall’ seeing live dinosaurs, or flying with their arms outstretched; the products of imagination take on the wrappings of memory. These rememberers know, rationally, that the events could not have happened, but they still unfold in their minds just like a memory would.

Pinter’s play is also alert to the emotional underpinnings of memory. Anna’s rose-tinted, impossibly perfect memories of London betray the fact that she wants things to have been a particular way in those heady days with the younger Kate. Emotional factors cause characters to mix memories that shouldn’t fit together. When Kate ‘remembers’ Anna lying dead, the corpse’s face is covered with dirt. One reading of this is that she has incorporated details from a real memory—the trick she played on Deeley in response to his sexual expectation—into the imagined scenario. At another point, recalling his trip to a café before the notorious party, Deeley clearly mixes up his memories of the two women, because it suits his revisionist self to do so.

Remembering is not something we do alone. For the characters in Old Times, negotiating an account of the past is a fraught, dangerous process. Memories can be weapons as well as instruments of persuasion. And memory has only a part-time interest in the truth. It deals in scenarios, real ones and imagined ones, making and remaking the self from the partial, damaged information available. As another writer, Mark Twain, observed in his autobiography, ‘When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened.’

Charles Fernyhough’s book on autobiographical memory, Pieces of Light, is published by Profile in the UK and HarperCollins in the US.

Programme essay reproduced by permission of John Good Ltd. Publishing.

Buy A Box Of Birds

Buy Pieces of Light (UK)

A Box of Birds: Reviews

'Arrestingly good prose… A thought-provoking novel that wrestles with the fundamentals of human nature.' Financial Times

'The plot, which flies past at genuine ‘page turner’ pace, involves a race to map the (fictional) Lorenzo Circuit, ‘the deep root-system of the self… the basis of memory, emotion and consciousness in the human brain’… I’m grateful for the siren warnings from the storytelling machine that is Charles Fernyhough.' The Psychologist

'A pleasantly sardonic narrator… There is… a certain edgy propulsion to the story, and the reveal of what is really going on in the bowels of Sansom’s research centre is deliciously horrible and deftly understated.' Guardian

'Part love story, part race against time to beat the baddies, Fernyhough can certainly write.' Daily Mail

'It’s rare these days to read a writer who cares about ideas in the way that the great nineteenth-century novelists did... This is both a serious novel and a great read.' Sara Maitland

'Exhilarating, thought-provoking and well worth the wait.' Andrew Crumey

Pieces of Light: Reviews

'Pieces of Light is utterly fascinating and superbly written. I learned more about memory from this book than any other. There are few science books around of this class.' Guardian

'Thoughtful… a deft guide to discoveries that have led memory researchers to stress the centrality of storytelling.' Booklist

'As absorbing as it is thought-provoking.' Sunday Business Post

'Remarkable storytelling skills... Seamlessly intersperses the personal aspects of [his] journey with descriptions of cutting-edge research into spatial naviation and memory manipulation, as well as new ideas about how memory works.' Moheb Costandi, Scientific American MIND

'With elegance and clinical sympathy, Fernyhough tells the stories of patients with various forms of brain damage that result in amnesia... a good, accessible read for anyone interested in their own recollections.' Professor Steven Rose, BBC Focus Magazine

'An absorbing guidebook to the mysterious terrain of human memory... In the tradition of Oliver Sacks’ casually shrewd scientific writing, the book blends dispatches from the frontiers of science with compassionate human anecdotes. Fernyhough’s enthralling narrative delivers gripping insight on the way memories shape our lives.'Editors’ Choice for w/c 19 March, iBookstore

'Weaving scientific research from psychology, neuroscience and evolutionary biology, Fernyhough explains that our brains don’t record experiences as cameras do; rather, we store key elements, then reconstruct the experiences when we need them, imbuing them with present-day feelings and the benefit of hindsight.' Washington Post(read more)

'In its stunning blend of the literary with the scientific, Pieces of Light illuminates ordinary and extraordinary stories to remind us that who we are now has everything to do with who we were once, and that identity itself is intricately rooted in transporting moments of remembrance. We are what we remember.' André Aciman, author of Out of Egypt and Harvard Square

'His examination [is] welcoming and accessible to lay readers. His analysis is wide-ranging... He also covers a wide swath of literary and historical ground... A refreshingly social take on an intensely personal experience.' Publishers Weekly (read more)

'A multidisciplinary approach to explaining memory... Will be intriguing for readers interested in the borderlands where memoir, fiction and science overlap.' Kirkus Reviews (read more)

'In this lyrical exploration of our powers of recall, psychologist and novelist Charles Fernyhough argues that our memories are worth cherishing - even though some of what we think we remember is, in fact, fiction.' New Scientist Books of the Year (read more)

'In Pieces of Light, Charles Fernyhough has had the arresting idea of writing a book about memory that is also a memoir. As a psychologist clearly well up on the latest research, he shows how memory itself relies on language and storytelling. Investigating his own memories with a writerly eye, he brings to vibrant life scenes from a childhood refreshingly free of misery.' Sunday Times Books of the Year (read more)

'In his hybrid of autobiography, journalism and pop psychology, Fernyhough lets the stories speak for themselves to highlight memory’s personal, subjective and fragile qualities. Fernyhough takes us on a captivating journey into the mind. And he does so with great style.' Telegraph (read more)

'Outstanding… Fernyhough’s skills as a writer are evident both in the beautiful prose and in the way he uses literature to illustrate his argument… He draws on both science and art to marvellous effect.' Observer (read more)

'Restrained and lyrical... an immense pleasure.' New Scientist (read more)

'A sophisticated blend of findings from science, ideas from literature and examples from personal narratives… refreshing, well judged and at times moving. This is an unusual book but a very rewarding one.' Times Higher Education (read more)

'Fernyhough deftly guides us through memory's many facets... Often using himself as a test case, he adds context with research and snippets from a raft of great writers. A thoughtful study of how we make sense of ourselves.' Nature (read more)

'Absorbing... In offering us a meditation on memory, Fernyhough has something important to say about one of the forces that is central to our lives.' The Lady (read more)

'Fernyhough is a gifted writer who can turn any experience into lively prose... The stories in Pieces of Light... will entertain anyone who reads them.' Financial Times (read more)

'Many popular science writers try to blend the autobiographical and the anecdotal into their work; few do it as seamlessly and successfully as Charles Fernyhough.' Blackwell's Book Podcasts (read more)

'Fernyhough argues that we don’t simply possess a memory; we reconstruct it anew every time we need to remember… Through his own experiences and those of others, from the very young to the very old, he explores the mystery of remembering and the ambiguity of forgetting.' Saga Magazine

'An enthralling investigation of that ‘thing’ we call memory… manages to write about complex things in a clear and understandable way.' Ian McMillan, The Verb

'Pieces of Light will both linger in your memory and change the way you think about it.’ Daniel L. Schacter